THE GOOD LIFE Watches
Hidden depths
The best new dive watches function beautifully and look supreme. But some of their greatest strengths aren’t visible on the surface
Words Timothy Barber
utility vehicles’ never get used for ‘sports’, nor stray far from the tarmac. Similarly, the tradi- tional diving watch is likely to be found al- most anywhere other than wrapped around a wetsuit sleeve. Dive computers have long since replaced the need for an analogue ticker. However, just like off-road vehicles that
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don’t often go off-road, dive watches that aren’t often used for diving have become a much-loved piece of kit for the age we live in. The mixture of resilience, bold style and vin- tage feel, plus the capacity to carry strong col- our variations, have made dive watches like the Longines Legend Diver, the Breitling SuperOcean and the Tudor Black Bay – all de- scended from historic models – trend-setting favourites among modern watch fans. Tudor this year even took the unheard-of step of releasing a Black Bay cased in sterling silver – about as un-rugged a material as one can imagine – with dial and bezel in a modish shade of taupe. Not that this apparently affects the funda- mental performance capability that under- pins the designation of an authentic diving watch. (Tudor says it’s using a particularly resilient version of the sterling silver alloy.) The benchmark for an authentic dive watch is an international standard, ISO 6425, that stipulates requirements including a uni-di- rectional rotating bezel to mark off elapsed time underwater; water resistance of at least 100 metres; luminous dial features for legibil- ity at depth; and a series of tests for factors
ou don’t need to be practised in the arts of suburban finger-wagging to know that – as useful as they may be – the vast majority of ‘sports
like shock resistance, anti-magnetism and condensation. You may wear it for nothing more strenuous than mowing the lawn, but as a piece of kit, a true dive watch remains a mean underwater machine – if you need it to be. It can also be a cause for good. A number of watch brands are taking the historic associa- tion with the sea as a basis for promoting pos- itive environmental change. Some of this is as flimsy as you’d imagine: press releases about stunts such as surfers being sponsored to per- form a morning’s beach clean-up while pro- moting a new watch, for example, drop into your correspondent’s inbox regularly. But a few brands are putting proper weight and re- sources behind the issue, paired with watches of equal credibility and seriousness.
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Above: Oris helps a Siberian conservation project with its Lake Baikal limited edition
lancpain, the historic fine watchmak- ing marque based in Villeret in the Jura mountains, launched its Ocean
Commitment project in 2014, supporting and promoting a panoply of conservation projects around the world. That’s tied to a watch that you could think of as the Land Rover Defend- er of dive watches. Called the Fifty Fathoms, it appeared in 1953, just as the era of scuba div-
‘You may wear it for nothing more
strenuous than mowing the lawn, but as a piece of kit, a true dive watch remains a mean underwater machine’
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